The Gaming Outpost

I woke from my sleep after the Native American spirit bore me to this world unknown to me with a luxurious stretch against the mound.

The mound looked much like the one in the other world, and I made note of this in my log. It is indeed possible that there exists pathways through the seemingly trackless wastes of the Multiverse. It would surprise me little if a people known for vision quests had secret ways between one physical world and the next.

Ways that with courtesy and gifts, I might borrow at need.

So I sketched the mound, and left a box of ammunition as a gift.

Others might leave a poem, or a basket of corn, but I am a sledgehammer in the search of people that need to be smashed. So I left bullets.

Walking across the nearly identical cornfields of that other world, it occurred to me that I might have been tricked. That spirit might have taken me nowhere. If so, I’d be back. I have spells to bind spirits, even if it is not an especial study of mine.

It goes hard against my instincts to bind, when I would free. Besides, spirits are chancy to mess with. But I do not suffer insult gladly; and indeed it would be an injury since I strongly needed to leave that world for fear of causing a temporal loop.

And would not that have been a pretty fix?

But, as I approach town, and read the German signways, I realize my paranoia is showing. And indeed my other worry of being in a parralel world seems unlikely.

Into Beinvald, I hike. My German is a bit rusty, but travellers are welcome in the beer garden, even with bad language. Especially, at this time of year, I am assured.

So I spin a gold coin toward my serving lass who was authentically German tavern wench in mood, even if red-headed and blue-eyed. She took the money, and summoned a goldsmith to change it for me.

My food and drink took the least of the coins I got in return.

Grand, a cheap world. It made it so much easier to buy things when a pound of gold was not required for a sausage.

The cool, and well lit room with its high glass framed ceiling was peaceful save for the chatter of people playing chess and their attendant kibbitzers. I soon saw they had some variant rules, I’d never heard of, and knew that my skill while decent, for an amateur, in my style game, would not match me with these.

The great hall, nearly a square two hundred feet on a side was abruptly disrupted by boys, schoolboys, rushing in for their lunchbreak and appallingly enough their pint of beer. The girls followed more sedately, and were served at their tables while the boys opted for the less service required and larger ‘Boy’s Meal.’

Both sipped their beers, as young as age nine, I’d say. I had to bite my lip to keep the objections in.

My food came, and it was in plenty. Sausages, and kraut, and cornbread (which spoiled the theme), and rice terriyaki with vinegar sauce, and my beer.

Well, I hardly drink, but I’ve learned to a bit. In some worlds, its the only safe beverage if you don’t want dysentery. Now my intestines are rather reinforced by methods of science and magic, but I had a theory to test.

So, I sipped and relaxed. It was yellow water, practically. If you chugged it, you might get a buzz.

The waitress came back with a plate of cookies. Gingerbread with frosting which I found rather odd.

“Where I come from these are Christmas cookies?” I ventured softly not wanting to start any trouble, but curious all the same.

It took some doing, but she reassured me that these were indeed Christmas cookies. This being Christmas Eve and all, they should be.

I looked about for a calendar, and found it. May 10th, 1987 Anno Domini was the date inscribed on the wooden block calendar.

I mentioned the idea of the birth of Christ in midwinter, and the farmers laughed at me. Who would want a frail creature to be born in midwinter? They thought God a better planner than that. Besides, what governor would order his charges to travel in midwinter for taxes or any other purpose?

And they thought my idea of paper calendars silly even if they allowed pretty pictures. No, a man made something to last, so he would not have to do it again. That gave him more time for the important things in life like drinking beer with his friends.

Feeling surprisingly relaxed, I nodded, and soon got talked into a game of chess which I lost quickly.

Christmas was fine indeed. Or should I say, the twelve days were fine.

I got myself a job as a farm laborer during a game of chess one night as fireworks blew outside the beer garden in honor of the fifth day of Christmas. In the meantime, I slept and ate at the hostel for a very reasonable price.

On the eight day of Christmas, I checked out the town library for a history. It started with German becoming the official language of America. And in the first World War, we came to the aid of the Kaiser against Britain. But, the Kaiser felt a bit guilty about the war, and refused along with the Americans to punish the Britons despite the cries of certain parties who begged for retribution.

And so, Europe passed into a modern age leaving behind aristocracy, but not entirely. A happier land that avoided the Weimar and the Nazi’s, and mustered the strength to save the Tsar even if he got exiled. But Anastasia went back to oust Lenin and become a constitutional monarch of the Kerensky Government.

And thus, no dark shadows troubled consciences, and fewer lies were spoken, and the weight of the world did not rest on the United States, and thus we came to my good neighbours who worked hard when they had to. But mostly drank a lot of very mild beer, and spent time on community and family before work.

My job as a farm laborer got me a bit more muscle, since I’d been slacking off on exercises. And it took me through to spring while I wondered what to do.

In this world, there seemed no need to smash things.

Oh, they had faults, as did my home world. And these people defined the terms ‘smug’ and ‘middle-class’. Unlike my Americans, they were not interested in learning things of other ways of doing things. They mostly knew it all already.

So, the Japanese pushed ahead of them in production, and no phoenix-like effect like in my land would save these people from second status. But maybe, the Japanese of this world would find that winning the rat race just made one a winning rat.

Maybe, smug middle-class values with a smidgeon of thrift and craftskilled hands, and a code of honor outlining duty to community and family could take over the world, and a slumberous and virtuous peace descend on the globe and smother ancient monsters that had taught my people so much, but at such cost.

Maybe some of my people were better paladins than these, but certainly many of my people were worse monsters, as well.

After the first year, I quit fretting, and started to get really involved in the community. Ten years later, and I started to paint my hair with touches of ‘premature gray’. Thirty years later, and I attended my ‘funeral’ as a ‘distant cousin’ who inherited.

Ten more years, as I worked in the Grain Mercantile Floor across from the rebuilt and expanded beer garden, I received notice that the town had decided to honor my ‘cousin’ by naming a street after him.

The Japanese did indeed submit to a virtuos slumber. Wars did not leave this world, but they were polite things by my standards. Innocents still died, in ways more, because super accurate weapons were not available, but mass casualties were avoided.

Common sense, and a light beer prevailed over the wild-eyed idealism of idealogues with utopias in their brain.

And I once again worked on becoming the ‘Old Gentleman’ until one day, a man with an asundry of weapons walked into the mercantile house. A ringing swish of fletchettes sliced into the noble columns of marble that held up the roof.

The traders fled, except for I. For I had heard some words.

“Verser, Tadeusz, come out!” Followed by a burst of gunfire. So I walked out, cane in hand. He sneered at me.

“Is this the great Tyrantsmasher? Where are your weapons? Swords?”

“Why would I need them?” I replied in the echoing emptiness of the now dust-filled room as electric lights flickered and something arced high above us.

He sneered. But eventually he told me that he and his clan of ubermenschen had been on the verge of greatness, until I stopped them with a bullet while they slept. And he had searched long and hard in ancient occult texts to find a spell that would deliver me to him.

I waited, and asked him about this greatness in the German, and he told me of eugenics camps, and brilliant breakthroughs and all made possible by brave men who cast aside traditional morality.

“I wish I could say Requiescat in Pace.” I said, as the farmers and traders marched back into the great hall of trade with their fowling rifles in hand. I nodded acceptance, and before my mad opponent could spin completely around to gun them down, nearly forty shotguns fired.

Instantly fatal for him, and fatal for me as well, but not instantly as I only caught some of the shot.

They rushed over to me, and shortly gave up trying to assure me that I would be okay. They were farmers, and they knew what life and death looked like.

So finally one asked me.

“We knew you were strange, indeed our fathers knew you were strange. We always figured you were one of the old ones come back to walk the Earth for a while, and see if we were righteous, and if we needed you back.
Tell us, Wotan-son, is this monster of shame more what we are known for in the many worlds of Yggdrasil, or …”

They were asking me what the Germans were known for in the Multiverse, in a deluded way. How could I tell them of the horrors attached to their land? I lacked the strength to lie, and yet I needed to take the poisen of the other one’s words away from these people.

And then I had it.

“Perfect love casts out fear. Indeed, my friends, it casts out a lot of other evils. Maintain your circles of love, and I doubt you shall meet another one such as him.”

And then I prayed to Jesus on Christmas Eve, as these fine folks had it, for peace as I transitioned to another world.

Tadeusz

To give credit where credit is due, the inspiration for writing this column comes from Kelly Tessena’s fascinating article My Adventures as a New GM: Cheating. I, too, wrote rules for Solitaire in my youth that were intended to make it if not easier to win, at least harder to lose. I did not include her rather creative “one free shuffle” rule; but I tried many variations to try to get at cards that were out of reach.

The question which Kelly and I might have asked ourselves then may have escaped both of us: if we don’t like the rules, why are we playing the game? I’m sure I could have answered that then, had it been asked. I’m less certain whether the answer I’d have given would have been correct, or at least whether it would have been the whole of the matter. In looking at Kelly’s house rules for solitaire and considering some of my own, it occurs to me that we were both doing something very specific, very technical, which has to be done in game design and also in running games. We were adjusting the challenge level of the game.

The importance of adjusting the challenge level of a game can be easily demonstrated by turning our attention to casino gambling. It is possible to design a game which can’t be won; in that situation, once it was clear that winning was impossible no one would play. There once was a game that sold extremely well that was impossible to win–you’ve seen its descendants, but the original had the numbers one through fifteen on little chits that could slide around between sixteen spaces on a square grid, but couldn’t (without breaking it) be removed. When you purchased it, the numbers fourteen and fifteen were reversed; a substantial prize was offered to the first person who could demonstrate a solution within the rules to get the numbers in order. It sold a lot of copies before someone demonstrated mathematically that there was no solution possible, and even then there were a few people who bought it because they didn’t think that kind of thing could be proved (it can). Yet in the main, people won’t play games they can’t win, and they certainly won’t pay to play them. On the other extreme, if the casino ran games that no one could lose, they might just as well dispense with the games altogether and just give away money–they’re going to go bankrupt, and for the majority of players, the game becomes the price of the money. In designing games for gamblers, the challenge has to be carefully set. One boundary is that the casino has to make more money than it pays out, or it doesn’t stay in business–which inherently means that the majority of players have to lose money the majority of the time. However, the other boundary is that enough players must win enough money often enough to keep them in the game.

I wasn’t playing for money; I was playing for my own entertainment. Like Kelly, I wasn’t winning enough to make me happy. That means that the challenge was too great for my level of ability and what we might call my satisfaction threshold. I wanted to be challenged, certainly; but I didn’t want to be as challenged as the book rules for the game demanded. I adjusted the challenge downward to meet my ability, not so that I would always win, but so that I would win often enough to be happy and still have to make an effort to play intelligently to do so.

It probably should be mentioned, in case it is not obvious, that this is something that only really matters in games which are about challenge, what current roleplaying theory would label gamist play. These are the games in which we are stepping up to the plate and proving ourselves against the odds, against the game, against the opponent, against whatever challenge is presented. Not all people play role playing games for this challenge, and not all games are designed for it. However, when the game does focus on challenge, it is important to get the level of that challenge in the comfort zone of the player.

A player who wants to be challenged doesn’t want to face impossible tasks; he doesn’t want to face tasks that are so near impossible that winning will be the incredibly rare exception. This is to a large degree a very personal issue. Part of it is the skill of the player. I have learned to play solitaire well enough by now that I don’t need those rules. (I learned to play in part by studying the game to figure out what rules would help. Whenever I lost, I would turn over all the hidden cards and examine them until I understood exactly why I lost and what I might have done differently to win. I learned a great deal about probabilities and strategies generally from those studies which have undoubtedly contributed greatly to my game design abilities.) I don’t know what percentage of games I win, but I’m comfortable with it. A better player will accept a greater challenge, because he’s up to it. Another part of it has to do with a personal tolerance for losing. I don’t play casino games because I know they’re designed such that no matter what your skill, the house has the edge. In fact, card counters, who would seem to be an exception to this, actually prove it. Anyone who has the ability to count cards well enough to know when the odds have tipped significantly in his favor who does so is, according to casino rules, cheating, and can be banned from play. The very thought that the game is rigged against me is, in that case, sufficient to dissuade me from it. Some people find that level of challenge more invigorating; they don’t mind losing more often, as long as they can feel like they’re winning against the odds when they do win. Thus we find that there’s a maximum level of challenge which a gamer will accept, which is very individual.

At the same time, a player who wants to be challenged doesn’t want a cake walk. He wants to be challenged. If everything is dropped into his lap, there’s no fun in it. The challenge is our opportunity to prove ourselves, to show that we can overcome the challenge. If there’s nothing to it, there’s neither any fun nor any glory in success. Again, skill plays a part in this. Most of us at one time found Tic-Tac-Toe challenging, but eventually most of us learned to play well enough that it became boring. A toddler is very excited to be able to walk across the room; so is someone recovering from a stroke or serious accident. Most of us don’t find that challenging, and don’t think of success as something of significance when we do it. At the same time, there is again a personal factor related to the margin of victory and our willingness to believe we might have failed. In some role playing games, there are players (often referred to as Munchkins) who build characters that can walk over anything without batting an eye. They find excitement in winning against things that never stood a chance. Personally I would find a game in which I effortlessly defeated a thousand enemies without suffering a scratch dull. I am much more thrilled by the game in which I almost died, but in that last stroke I saved the world and myself with it (oh–but don’t tell the referee that). There is a sense in which a close game suggests a close match in ability and thus much more laudable victory to me; yet I understand how a win by a wide margin can suggest superiority to someone else. Thus setting that minimum challenge is also a very personal matter.

I think everyone has it within them to enjoy a game that is played for the challenge. Those who have been put off by such games usually had a bad experience, which means in this context one in which the challenge was outside their comfort zone, whether too great to be faced or to small to be interesting. Thus in preparing our games we need to attempt to identify how challenging they should be for the group.

Some game designs attempt to address this with mechanical systems to rate the challenge of an opponent, such that it can be matched to the abilities of the characters. This is probably a step in the right direction; but it needs to be adjusted to consider the players. It is not a matter so much of having the right level of challenge for the characters, but of having the right level of challenge for the players who will be using those characters. The characters are, after all, only the tools through which the players meet the challenge, the limits on what solutions are possible within which the players will address the problems. Matching the challenge to the tool is a bit like deciding what sort of music a violinist can play based on the name on his violin. Owning a Stradivarius does not make the player a virtuoso. Playing a powerful character does not mean the player is up to the greatest challenges, or that he wishes to face them. Customizing challenge to the player is a lot trickier, but is ultimately necessary best to ensure that the player will enjoy the game.

Mercifully, most players have a fairly wide range between their minimum and maximum challenge levels. Otherwise it would be extremely difficult to run a game for one player, and unlikely in the extreme that even two would be happy in the same game. Targeting a level of challenge that gives everyone enough of an opportunity to win and enough of a threat of losing to keep them happy doesn’t require advanced math. It does require being aware of the possibility that you might be outside someone’s comfort zone in this regard, and the flexibility to get back within it.

Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc. His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.

  Adam Smith is one of those people who changed the world, or at least our perception of it, significantly.  He is almost always listed among the most influential people in the past millennium, for making an entire field of study respectable and establishing some of its most basic theories.  He said that every person would always act in his own best interest, and that this would always create competition between individuals, causing whatever is most desired by most people to have the greatest value in society.  His theory is called capitalism, and he stands as one of the icons of economics.

  It is interesting that capitalism postulates without judgment that everyone will always work toward his own best interest.  This in itself has become a value in our world.  Look out for number one, we say, Take care of yourself.  We recognize the value of putting your own concerns first, of focusing your best efforts on making your own life better.  This self interest is a value we promote in our culture, and one which we respect in others, perhaps even revere.

  Interestingly, the Dungeons & Dragons™ alignment system also gives this value an honored place in its hierarchy.  It calls this Evil.

  One of the beauties of this definition of evil is that in the minds of many people there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it.  We tell each other in all sincerity that the most important thing you can do is take care of yourself, because no one else is going to put your interests first.  It is perfectly defensible in our world to be the sort of person who always gives first thought to how something will benefit him, what it will cost and whether the return is worth the investment, how to protect himself while taking full advantage of opportunities which present themselves.  Few of us would say that this is evil; we’d say it’s good common sense, practical thinking, pragmatic, even perhaps wise.  Putting your own interests first, putting yourself in the center of your own world, is in the minds of many the best, perhaps the only practical, way to live.

  Yet the consequence is the same.  If beneficence is the definition of good, if putting the welfare of others as the top priority in all that you do is that which characterizes goodness (as we showed a few weeks back in Beneficence), then it follows logically that putting your own interests first is the central concept of evil.  Where the good character will say, I matter to the degree that I can benefit others, the evil character says, Others matter to the degree that they can benefit me.

  The rest flows quite naturally from that.  If the only benefit you hold for me is that someone else will pay me to kill you, then your purpose in this world, from my perspective, is to die so that I can collect my paycheck.  That’s an extreme example, and certainly (particularly given modern detection and jurisprudence) there may be reasons why killing you would not be in my best interest, unless the paycheck was particularly high.  Yet there is this direct correlation between every evil act and someone’s decision to put their own interests above those of the rest of the world.

  There is another interesting facet of this belief which is often overlooked.  Those who hold it, as Adam Smith suggested, also believe that everyone else holds the same belief.  Of course the Blessed Mother Theresa did so much to help the poor; she believed that she would be greatly rewarded in an afterlife, and so was working diligently to earn those rewards.  Karol Jozef Cardinal Wojtyla dedicated so much time and effort to his religious work, and we can see how it paid off when he became Pope John Paul the Second.  These people who claim they’re doing things to make the lives of others better have a profit motive all the same.  They’re hoping and believing that someone, be it God or the king or the Nobel Prize Committee, will notice their good works and reward them.  Everyone, Smith tells us, puts his own interests first.  Anyone who appears to be doing otherwise either has a different notion of that which is in his own best interest, or is trying to con you.  Thus the person who adheres thoroughly to this credo of evil is quite certain not only that his is the best, most rational, value system around, but that everyone else who pretends to value something else really can be shown to agree with him, as they will all ultimately act as if their own individual interests, as they understand them, were most important regardless of anything they might say to suggest otherwise.

  There are problems to being evil, in this sense, though, quite apart from the fact that you really don’t understand anyone who is good (since you think they are thinking exactly what you’re thinking, and they aren’t).  Good people don’t trust you.  That’s hardly a surprise; after all, you’re evil.  However, what is surprising to players who play evil characters is that evil characters don’t trust you, either.  Even saying it, I get a vision of Kevin Kline’s Otto in A Fish Called Wanda staring at the empty safe from which he was about to remove the diamonds he and his cohorts had stolen, yelling, “What do you have to do to get people to trust you?”  The fact is, good characters don’t trust you because they think you’re only out for your own interests; evil characters know this to be true.

  In fact, you don’t trust anyone else, either, because you know that whatever they say, they’re ultimately after their own interests.  They may say they’re good, but when the rubber meets the road they’ll put themselves first every time.  After all, that’s what you’d do, right?  What makes you think they’re different, other than that they think it’s to their advantage to try to make you believe they’re different?

  Further, there’s no reason why anyone should trust the evil character.  When Han Solo tells Princess Leia that he’s not in it for her or her rebellion or anything else but the money, he’s expressing what is at the core of the beliefs of the evil character:  if there’s no advantage to me, there’s no reason to take the risk.  (Han eventually proves that he actually is one of the good guys; whether this is a change of heart when faced with the example of people who actually are doing all they can to make the world a better place for other people or because all that evil talk was always just so much bluster behind which he was hiding is another question.)

  In evaluating whether evil characters in my D&D games are abiding by their alignments, I consider all these points.  To those who say it is easier to play an evil character than a good one, I invite them to try it.  They’ll find that it’s not so easy to be consistently selfish and not raise the ire of everyone from party members to local citizens to exalted rulers.  It’s not impossible to play this way; sometimes it is in your best interest to get along with others and help them.  Just don’t be caught doing this when it clearly isn’t.  Those who say that there is honor among thieves are generally thieves who know that it’s to their advantage for you to trust them.  Experienced thieves know better.  Truly evil characters know that you don’t trust them and they don’t trust you, and once that’s established we can get down to the business of negotiating our relationship so that each of us gets what he wants along with guarantees against the inevitable doublecross.

  It all comes down to whether you believe that everyone always acts in his own best interest, and you choose to do the same.  Thus, the great Adam Smith is the patron saint of all that is evil, at least in game terms.

  Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.

  Longer ago than I like to think, in the summer following my first year of college, I took a job as a security guard at a nearby university.  The lieutenant on the swing shift was a recent graduate of that school, and during the summer took the time to come around and get to know what we liked and didn’t like.  After all, there were many different sorts of security posts at a university.  Someone had to sit out in the main parking lot and keep an eye on the cars.  Each of the dormitory areas had its own guard shack, for someone to be available for situations that arose there.  In the administration area a guard walked from building to building periodically punching a key to prove to the insurance company that the place was being watched.  At the dental school someone had to be at the desk, leaving briefly once an hour to check the gauges at the boiler and the morgue, and there were a few other quiet spots where no one was seen for hours but a security guard had to be there.  The temperaments of the numerous guards who filled these spots also varied.  Some wanted to be somewhere where they could chat with students.  One particularly liked being out in the parking lot, as far from people as he could be.  I was one of the few who really preferred a quiet spot alone somewhere, where I could pray, and read whatever I brought, and get a bite to eat when I was hungry.  This lieutenant made a point to find out what we all preferred.

  Then school resumed, and although this job had been nearly half an hour from home, it was maybe two blocks from my school, so it was convenient to keep it.  Of course, school mattered more than keeping some security job.  Sure, the money was nice, but I didn’t need the money–I just liked having it to spend on musical equipment, presents for people, recording tape, food, and books.  Determining that the lieutenant seemed quite willing to keep me on those quiet posts where I could do my homework between rounds, I said I would stay on into the fall.

  However, something changed.  I don’t know whether it was the influx of large masses of students; the lieutenant said that the students were all out to get us so frequently it sounded like paranoia.  Maybe it was merely that after three months on the job he was settling in to it and not worrying so much about impressing the boss; maybe he thought that a tougher stand would impress the boss.  It’s possible that something happened of which I heard nothing.  Perhaps it was just his true colors shining through.  Whatever the cause, he began throwing around his weight.  Wherever you preferred to be, that’s where you would not be stationed.  If you didn’t like being with the students, he put you in the dormitories.  If you didn’t want to be alone, you got the parking lot.  If you wanted time to do something, you were given a walking post, but if you had nothing to do but sit on your hands you would land at a quiet desk with nothing to do.  Everyone hated him very quickly, but he insisted that we had no right to complain and no reason to expect a post we liked.

  I was stubborn.  I wasn’t going to let him beat me.  I put on my best smile and made the best of things.  My homework slipped a bit, and I found less time in my day for the things I wanted to do, but wherever he put me, I did my best–and I made it clear to him that he wasn’t going to break me.

  One day I arrived at the office without my hat.  This was not usually a big deal; during the summer no one had worn hats, and although there was a much stronger emphasis on them once school began no one had ever made an issue of it.  As I entered the office, he looked at me.  “Where’s your hat?” he demanded.

  “Oh,” I said, surprised; “I must have left it in my room.”

  “Go home.”

  As I walked out of that office, I realized something about our quarrel which had not occurred to me before.  I was fighting at a disadvantage.  My adversary not only had a stronger position, he had the power to change the rules whenever it suited him to do so.  This was not only not a level playing field, it was not a reliable one.  I went home.  The next morning I stopped in to see the day lieutenant, gave him my uniform, and informed him that I wasn’t going to fight with the evening lieutenant anymore.  He was quite aware that I needed to be posted somewhere where I could do my homework, and had promised that he would accommodate that when school began.  I didn’t need the job.

  Not quite a decade later, Lech Walensa was in the news.  For those too young to remember, or for whom old foreign news all blurs together, Walensa was the most visible leader of the labor movement at the Gdansk shipyard in Poland.  He began pressing the government to recognize greater rights for the workers, to improve working conditions, and more, and it splashed into the international news.  The government attempted to appear reasonable, to negotiate, to work with him at first; but then everything changed, and there were warrants out for his arrest.  He was detained, imprisoned for reasons that were never quite clear in the media.  Labor took one step forward, then two steps back.

  I remembered my fight with the lieutenant.  Walensa, as I, was up against an adversary who had the power to change the rules of the game at any moment.  It was not a game he could win, and for that very reason.

  All this comes back to me now because I’ve realized that I have the power to make some of the rules around here, in this house.  It’s Saturday, and moments ago I reminded my son that trash has to go to the dump.  It’s his job; he gets out of a lot of other jobs around here because he takes the trash to the dump.  His response this time, while typing in his online multi-user dungeon game, was that if it had to be done I had better do it.

  I don’t think he understands the situation.  I’m wondering whether to cancel his Internet service (the line on his computer is separate from mine).  It occurs to me that I should insist that he give me his car keys, since my understanding was that he would have them so that he could take trash to the dump without bothering anyone about it, and could use the cars within reason for other things.  I gave thought to informing him that we couldn’t afford to continue paying for his college tuition, and that this would mean he was no longer covered under the health insurance; and that if he wasn’t going to school, he should get himself a job and find a place to live.  He doesn’t understand how dependent he is here.  This is not a negotiation between equals.  It is a power struggle between someone who has the ability to change the rules and someone whose only choices are to play by the rules or quit the game.

  It’s a very uncomfortable situation.  It is uncomfortable for me, at least; and I’m sure it could be uncomfortable for him if I started pushing back.

  It is uncomfortable enough that I want to advise you to avoid creating such situations in your gaming groups.  In many games, and in many groups, power is focused on one person.  It is frequently the case that the host of the game is also the referee; this means that one person has tremendous power to decide the way the game is going to be played, because if you don’t like it there’s little recourse other than not to play.  Even worse are those situations in which the referee is beholden to one of the players, and does not have the ability to rule fairly because that player is threatening, however subtly, to end the game if things don’t go his way.  My advice is to walk away from these games.  Obviously someone has to make decisions; but when there is a power struggle and one of the parties has the ability to change the rules or end the game, it’s time to find a different game.

  Incidentally, Lech Walensa won.  It was an expensive win; he was jailed several times, and vanished completely for a while with the entire world wondering what had happened.  Eventually his efforts, supported by uncounted others, brought down the government.  He was a remarkable man who paid an unreasonable price for a precious object, and he succeeded.  If it’s important enough, you can win those power struggles, as long as you’re willing to sacrifice everything else to do it.  My job was not as important than that; neither is forcing my son to go to the dump.  Your game is not that important, either.  Keep your friendships.  Find another game.

  Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.

I and Miss Carlyle were politely but firmly confined on the flight deck of the Jennifer Carlyle, the biggest and fastest zeppelin outside of Germany, and owned by the lady’s father.

Unfortunately, her father unwittingly kept company with an impostor, and the men who kidnapped us after rescuing us from a sure to be fatal attempt at landing a biplane believed Miss Carlyle to be the fraud.

All thought so, except the cowboy with the black eye, who sat glowering at the rubber coated iron plates of the deck.

Eventually, we arrived in stiff silence at the Kansas City Aerodrome’s Tower, and got pulled to the ground, and we unloaded under the watchful eyes and ready guns of our captors. The locals were unhappy until our kidnappers explained they were kicking some troublemakers off of the Carlyle Ranch which was the magic word. Even a hundred miles away, they had heard of that spread.

I looked at my hands, and made some idle comment about what a bunch of wimps they were. If they were real men they would put down their guns, and come try to punch me out.

They resisted, so I started laughing softly. The first guy came at me, sloppy, but strong, and quick with no concern for protecting his legs. So I swept his feet, and hammered him in the ribs. Too my surprise he got up again. It took two more falls to finish him off.

Others wanted to help, but the straw boss refused noting that I had training in the secret fighting arts of the mysterious East, and if Otto couldn’t handle me, they ought to be glad they had guns.

Drat. Well it had never been much of a plan to begin with. Hoping they would politely line up and let me punch them all unconscious and take back the zep would not work.

They got back on the zeppelin, and the cowboy commisserated with me. Then we looked around for Miss Carlyle. She had disappeared. Fearing more kidnappers armed with chloroform cloths, I prepared to raise a hue and cry, but a sharp-eyed boy with a dog he called Indiana pointed out that …

“The stupid girl is climbing on the netting under the zep!”

I threw him a gold coin, and we sprinted out after the zep, but it gained on us as it began to raise off from the ground.

The cowboy grabbed a fellow’s English riding horse, and showed him a dirigible to silence the protest. Then with him guiding the horse, and me riding apillon, we raced out. He urged every last bit of speed out of the startled beast, and soon we came under the dirigible.

I stood on the tip of the back of the English saddle, and then as the front edge of the gondola came even with us, I launched in a two-step sure to make a back ache by using the cowboy’s back and right shoulder as my runway, and just barely caught the edge of the gondola’s bottom.

Pain shrieked through my fingertips, and without my titanium fingernail underlays, I would surely have lost more than just the one nail I lost.

I wobbled near helpless in the buffeting air, and I heard people wonder about the sound, until the quick thinking cowboy blasted his derringer of in a faux but convincing display of fury.

Distracted, they went back to their game of poker, and I extended my claws, and began to climb up the side of the gondola using the wooden supports as my “scratching post”.

I slipped and near fell twice. Once due to a weakness in the wood and I had put my fingers too closely together (I was not well practised in this skill), and the other, well, my arm started trembling from outrage at the abuse I subjected it too.

But eventually, I obtained the netting under the dirigible, and found a note with perfume in the steadily increading torrent of wind.

“Are you crazy? Meet me up top, M.C.”

So, Miss Carlyle had not hung around waiting to see if her heroic rescuer made it, or went splot. A most driven young woman, and liable to induce her admirers to grind themselves into paste to impress her. Luckily, I smiled as I fingered my simple gold ring, I had no need to win her.

The thought brought new strength to me, and cheered my heart. It took several minutes of climbing the rigging on the outside of the zeppelin for me to wonder if a genuine appreciation of a love was a magic here.

I’d heard from di Vars that he’d been in a world where a lady’s favor, say a scarf, could blunt a sword strike. Its a wise verser who pays attentions to little discrepancies, if he has time.

Finally, I achieved the top, only to find that Miss Carlyle was again tied up by a dark-eyed man with a sinister smile. He waved me closer, and then with a flamboyant gesture, he pulled from his elegant jacket, a radio control. One flip, and the engine of the dirigible stopped.

“I find it so much easier to have a conversation without that incessant wind, don’t you?”

“Run away, stay away, he can’t catch you.” Miss Carlyle gave me some advice which showed she actually did like me a bit. It was bad advice. I shook my head.

“He’s quite right, you know, my dear. Why I have only to flip this other switch and a small, but powerful incendiary device will turn this bag of hydrogen into a bag of fire. I shall be well off this thing by that time with my parachute, but not you or the delectable Miss Carlyle, or those poor brave men, the dolts gambling below us.”

I walked over the yielding surface closer.

“Why? And Why?”

“Why? I was hired to kill you both, or more precisely eliminate any problems, and it took some time to get things set up. I really want the zeppelin to go down in wild country far from towns.”

“And this will look like an accident?”

“A student of the fine art of murder. Excellent.” He said giving me what later generations would call a golf clap, as Miss Carlyle suppressed the urge to swear while laying tied up in front of his feet.

“I don’t murder.”

“No?” He raised an eyebrow.

“I execute criminals.”

He looked a bit put out.

“Well, I am an artist of physical violence. And I was much impressed by your handling of that great oaf at the landing. So, I thought to try my European skills against your secret fighting techniques. See which was better.” So saying he whipped out a rapier, and hop stepped over Miss Carlyle who tried to bite his ankle ineffectually.

As he advanced, I realized he intended no great fairness. He had a sword, and I had my hands, as far as he knew.

“You have heard of the Iron Hand technique, haven’t you?” I asked as I backed up to get him away from the lady. He nodded, and knowingly accepted my ploy since it pushed me closer to an edge.
“Some teach an Open Palm Iron Finger technique” I said and presented my palm to him while extruding my titanium nails. He lunged under my arm, and I drove my fingers down into his blade snapping it.

“Oopsie.” I said with a nasty smile. And then I realized a mistake. The rapier point fell toward the zep’s skin, and pierced it, and fell further. It had at least seventy feet to fall, and if it hit anything metal on the way that would mean sparks, and maybe a catastrophe.

Trying to recover my error, I dove forward and knifehanded the fencer in the throat and also knifepunched, and ripped off his parachute, and tried to charge across billowing piles of zep fabric like it was a track meet.

I got to Miss Carlyle, and my nails made short work of the ropes. I shoved her into the chute, and knew we were safe.

No fire yet.

I turned around to see the fencer pull out his knifepunched rc device.

“Who are you? What was that?” He asked in surprised dismay. We had to give him our word that he would stand trial before he surrendered the hilt of the sword. Otherwise he would have tried to do what I almost accidentally did. He would have flung his blade into the belly of this great beast and hoped for fire and annihilation.

He traded his broken blade for the ropes that had tied up Miss Carlyle.

And questioning him revealed little. He was a hired killer, the second son of a lord, and disinherited for cheating at cards.

He only knew that his employer looked exactly like Miss Carlyle and had a ring with the insignia that looked like a skull.

Miss Carlyle whispered to me that she thought he probably worked for the Worldwide League of Crime of which Fu Manchu was a founding director. And I suddenly realized, I had been here before. We had found Copernicus’ lost treasure, and been involved with the first astronaut travel into space on this world.

But it might be earlier than that here. If I stayed long enough, might I meet myself here? That could cause all sorts of problems with causuality. I resolved to avoid such a situation.

I seem to remember David telling me of some time loop he’d been caught in. Not a cool thing.

We restarted the zeppelin after I fixed the wiring in the rc control, and a chilly trip later found us back at the ranch.

Another half-hour of waiting with a charming and witty killer, and we left him tied up there, secured to the zep, and gagged, and we slipped down.

Luckily the gondola’s had thin windows easily broken, and the suspension bridge walkway between the gondola and the tower was easily pulleyed back into position by Miss Carlyle.

We descended to the ground, and I felt quite grateful for solidness. So I breathed a prayer of thanks, and we silently made our way around the barn, and the stables to the main house by a circuitous passage pioneered by a certain young woman who as a child had been intent on escaping chores.

And thus we walked into a trap. Two sneering men with tommy guns, and a woman dressed in black that looked almost exactly like Miss Carlyle except for her cigarette holder and the Luger held in her gloved fingers waited behind several giant rolls of hay back of the stables.

“When the Zeppelin came back I knew something was up. Well, I did need something to demonstrate my point of view. So this really works out for the best.” The other woman said with a German accent.

Miss Carlyle choked, and looked astounded into her twin’s face. I had been expecting as much. In some universes, well, cliche’s are more common in reality than in most.

We were tied up again, and the other Fraulein Carlyle explained.

“Our Mother was visiting Europe with Father when he got called away to negotiate sales of beef to the Tsar. Well, she suddenly began to give birth early. And so she was forced to rely on her German cousins. Twins were born, and the cousins had always known of the greed and nastiness and lack of culture of the American so they took it upon themselves to make sure that one of the blood had a good education. But they come upon hard times, and they see the Carlyle Ranch, and a great plan is born.”

Just checking something, I murmured “Heil Hitler.” And I saw her begin to snap to attention.

“I do not think you are Nazi despite your Aryan bloodlines. You are a clever tool of inferior races; you Americans could be great, but you prostitute yourself…”

At which point my Miss Carlyle said something snippy about prostitutes and the other one’s immodest gown, and our little conversation ended with murderous glares all around.

Our chairs and our bodies got dragged by some henchmen into the dining hall making awful scrapes on the silk smooth wooden floor.

We interrupted a large dinner party of the local social elite.

“Daddy!” Miss Carlyle yelped, and then a gag got shoved into her and my mouths. The worried looking, but distinguished rancher at the head of the table looked sadly at her with disapproval at her attempt at ‘trickery’.

“Good people, good people of this valley between the mountains. As you know, the Carlyle Ranch is the biggest and richest of all the ranches here.”

“Only because Old Man Carlyle got my great-granpappy drunk on the night before pappy was going to prospect, and Carlyle got the jump on him.” A man called out in good humor. General laughter echoed around the comfortable and elegant room.

Fraulein looked irritated.

“None the less…”

“Get to the point, miss, iffen you don’t mind.” One man said with what he thought of as politeness.

Fraulein pulled out her luger and shot it into the ceiling.

“You louts with your inch thick steaks and warm wools will shut up, now! I am speaking. I, the Carlyle daughter tell you your insignificant plots of land will be sold to the Carlyle family, and tonight.”

Pa Carlyle tried to protest, but the Fraulein merely pointed out his ill health and the power of attorney he had just signed.

Then her henchmen came in, and handed out pens with smirks, and tossed contracts onto the table.

“Sign.” the Fraulein ordered.

“Why, what purpose do you do this to your friends, your neighbours?” Pa Carlyle said quietly, but with an obvious to me smoldering anger.

“Peace and quiet.” She replied dismissively not noticing her father’s anger.

Suddenly, I had a vision of German troops being airlifted into a secluded but expansive and well-stocked valley. Over my dead body. Problem was the Fraulein tied really good knots, and my nails could not reach the ropes.

No one had moved yet.

Fraulein Carlyle grabbed a pen from the table and shoved it into the hands of the man closest to her.

“Sign or die.”

“You’re not…” Pa Carlyle began.

And then we all heard a click next to the extortionist. And the woman seated next to the first man coldly spoke.

“I recognize the accents of Bavaria even if you try to hide them. But the past always follows us; like my past as a slightly less reputable girl than some, I always carry a gun in my purse. Now you will be surrendering, won’t you?”

In a matter of moments, the goons had the guns taken from their hands, and the solid citizens were opening up the gun cabinets and getting out Winchester rifles.

We were freed, and the story told, and a troubled Mr. Carlyle, after arranging for a sweep of his property had the doctor who had attended sedate the criminally inclined young woman who was a sort of “impostor” in lieu of any better plan for the night.

I did not envy them their attempts to reform her that they doubtless intended, but here I said my adieu’s and left for the night.

I had seen an Indian mound going cross country on the zep, and it made me curious. So I got dropped off there by a cowhand with a Model T.

It being a clear night with a full moon, I gathered some food I had brought into a basket, and a couple gold coins, and walking widdershins around the mound seven times while telling the tale of Johnny Appleseed.

Soon enough, I was joined by a brave who took the basket I offered, and told me a story of Geronimo. And thus we went through the night, each trading stories of far off places and great men.

“So, paleskin, what do you want?” He asked as dawn brightened the horizon.

“Passage to another world of dirt. I fear the lines of cause and effect might be tangled if I stay here.”

“Well said, and thought. But I will require that you owe me a favor.”

We haggled about the terms a bit as dawn never got brighter, and then I nodded. And we walked into the mound, and out the other side into a different world.

“Good hunting, Ghost.” He bade me farewell, and I turned to wave, but I was not surprised that the spirit or ghost was already gone.

Tired, I found a spot to relax, and sank into slumber. I’d explore this world in the daylight.

Tadeusz

?It was the best of times and it was the worst of times.? I find those words appropriate in the ‘verse. And I’m not just talking about the worlds around us sojourners, but the condition of the heart.

You see, we walk in the footsteps of gods and duel with mages of unimaginable power, but when ego starts asserting itself, the Multiverse quite promptly proves us wrong and shows us the utter futility and pettiness of any such mindset.

That is how I felt right about now. Ten Deltas, scared out of there wits and little more than kids, were my only allies, not including the girl beside me. That was another complication. I was approaching a hundred and fifty years old myself and I was long since married, developing the the hard won instincts of a grandparent by having raised countless adopted children. The specific problem was that I, by and large, hadn’t aged a day since entering the ‘verse well over a hundred years before and I could see the natural response of a teenage girl looking at a desirable teenage guy (relative to a position of character and trust…just to elaborate). To be fair, it was deathly subtle. She hid it well under layers of courtly training, but experienced eyes are a good match against talent.

Nonetheless, I didn’t need it right now, despite it’s subtlety. That is why I have always fought for a gender segregated military; not because of any anachronistic views of women’s fragility, but the resulting friction and sexual politics. Commanding armies gives you strong opinions on the subject.

Anyway, we we’re about two hours out of Chicago. The old deuce and a halfs were lousy and efficiency, but great on fuel capacity, meaning we could probably make St. Paul and the regional office without stopping for diesel. It also meant I could et new thoughts consume me.

I had a significant part of Oswald’s mind. How much I couldn’t tell, but I had vital details nonetheless. The first thing I realized is that all the APCs and equipment and the truck weren’t Army, they were the part of some type of ?national federal police corps? that had been erected by Pres.-for-life Kennedy after his wife’s death.

I also knew that all of this didn’t happen overnight. It was a mix of logical and rationalized decisions leading up to it. Pulling out of Vietnam was the first. Increasing jurisdiction and police powers of federal agencies was the next. After that, one by one, they broke down barriers, erased checks, and unbalanced the balances. The last nail in the coffin was probably the Congressional decision on December 17th, 1968 to vest almost all Congressional powers into the Executive, leaving these people with the current conditions.

As bad as things were, they were better than other places. South America and Asia had been given over to organized crime. The Soviet Union was a truly Orwellian police state. Europe was in the middle of a neo-fascist fever which left NATO a joke and Interpol non-existent. It was, unfortunately, the most accepting world in the world in respect to Deltas.
There had been a time when Deltas were not feared, but loved and envied, particularly through the harrowing works of various costumed vigilantes. Comic books were like the dime serials of the 19th century, exaggerating the events, but far more real than any comic book from my world.

And I was also able to answer the nagging question of where the term ?Delta? came from. Turns out that the first Delta was an American in 1917 fighting in WWII who saved twenty men by throwing them head long out of a trench behind a rock outcropping two hundred yards away while the Germans charged them. Their COs discounted the whole thing as battle fatigue until a British doctor examined the guy after he showed no ill symptoms poison gas attack. The doctor claimed to have observed four stages in his transformation from a regular human and he cataloged each stage under a letter of the Greek alphabet, the last stage being the ?Delta? stage. The definition was in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1919 (the year after the end of the war) and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary by 1923.

Of course if you think that was more than you wanted to know, then you have no idea what I was going through having to sift through the crap from Oswald’s brain. He was obsessive, having having had a rather pathological chance of heart after he failed to kill Kennedy, he went from a man with dreams but few plans to an obsessive workaholic with goals that could be counted on one hand.

Then I started getting images, then tastes, then smells, and then all the rest of the senses. I got sexual conquests and the hookers in back alleys. The hazed blur of vision on a wave of gin and later vodka. The hours of tedium in libraries and basements. The manic conspiracies that once dwelled in the back of his mind. You see, I now had every memory of every fear and phobia, except it wasn’t buried in his subconscious now. It was all to present in my waking thoughts.

The on-coming headlights jolted me out of a stupor and back into my lane as I heard squeals and grunts from the back and Annalise spring from a cat nap, her fingers digging quite deeply into my arm with reflex.

?What just happened?!?

?Well, I nearly crashed into that truck right about then.?

She breathed heavily and gave me a stare that could part seas if it wanted to.

I got a comment from the back and answered in response with a grunt, which seemed sufficient to the lot. I figured that now was a time as good as any to get all our ducks in a row and the ambiguity between Annalise and i out of the way.

?I wish I could talk to my wife right about now.? The statement hung. I could give you cliched sayings about pin drops and the density of air, but I think you get the effect. Her face turned pale, but she did little to respond for several seconds, besides swiveling her head and staring blankly at me.

There were no tears, stifled or open, but I saw that austere shell wanting to crack, to rend apart like continents. I didn’t know what she exactly thought of me because I had stayed far away from her mind, holding to professional ethics like a doctor, because I had held similar power.

However, some thought pickups are unavoidable. After years of practice a mind becomes so sensitive that thoughts pass as scents through the air. Her thoughts were one resounding crash across the ether. All her pictures of marriage, children, old age; all were now banished to the recesses of memory. I knew it was not some fleeting infatuation. It had been a deep abiding, a calm that she had found someone she could call her own. All of that in one mental scream.

So I said nothing. She turned into the corner where the seat met the cabin and wedged her face into the crevice. Nothing console her, save time and the Almighty himself.

That dichotomy, of frailty and a vague shimmer of greater purpose, has always perplexed me and even been a burr in my faith. I see the vast failings human kind, but those same fallen souls can show what their Creator meant them to be.

That thought was a dividing point between the angst of this world and the answer to shout back into it’s darkness. Mind you, while I admire Ghandi and Martin Luther King and others of their ilk, I could not call myself a pacifist. ?Turn the other cheek.? and the surrounding passage are the foundation of that philosophy in modern times (not including it’s older forms), whether it’s practitioners were Christian or not, but the emphasis to the exclusion of any defense of self or others has always seemed a casualty of logic and man’s want to make Scripture fit his sentiments.

But I was old enough now to know the profound ambiguity of fallen worlds and that the Creator is not one of camps of thought, but one who lays all bare in a harsh and perfect light. I new that war would not serve His will.

We were still going to Saint Paul, but with a very different goal now…

Actually we were headed to Minneapolis. I stopped on the outskirts and got everyone out. We moved in groups of three and four until we met in the center of town, near an RF transmitter.

So I stretched out before, as with the street lamps, modulating the signal into a tinny series of clicks and long strikes that make up morris code. The travel outward, bouncing off the ionosphere into the distance and sending ham radio operators into confusion.

I gave it half an hour and a black van pulled to the curb, the door sliding open with practiced timing. A hand slid out of the interior shadow and beckoned us forward into the cabin. I waved everyone in.

The van meandered out of the city to an outlying farm town. We pulled up to a row of large and weathered grain silos. Our hooded friends pushed us out and pointed at a small shed as they took the van down the gravel road that we had just come here on.

So we went to the shack, had the obligatory gun pointed into our faces, and were let through after a thorough frisking and what felt to me to be a mind scan. Then we went through a hatch buried in the dirt of the shack floor. We ended up inside the silos and there, in the center of a rather oddly shaped interior, sat a man in fatigues chewing on a cigar and looking around a vast table at other faces. As we approached he turned to us.

?Where’s Cavalier??

It wasn’t a question that could be answered lightly and a smarmy response might earn a certain measure of backlash. I answered him (known as Patriot, from what I overheard) the only way I knew how.

?I killed him.?

?Bound to happen sooner or later.?

His expression matched his words, something of regret mixed with relief.

?He was a good recon source, but the guy had screws loose…Anyway, what the hell are you doing here risking lives? If you’re the knew cell leader, then you should be turning around and getting back into the field. Chicago is going to be nearly impossible to get you back into for at least a year. We might send you to New York–?

?No.?

He definitely didn’t like being interrupted.

?What?! I run things. I put this resistance together and I am sure as hell not taking orders from some punk kid–?

?I am far older than you think. And I am here to end this all, not to take orders. If you want to ally with me in my cause than I welcome it, but you are merely an obstacle if you don’t.?

I kept my palms open and my arms at my sides, just to keep the tension from boiling over. I wasn’t here for territory, but a goal, and I wanted his help.

So he put the cigar down and said, ?Fine. Show me I’m wrong.?

I laid it out. Each cell would gather like minded civilians to volunteer. Only enough to fulfill the purpose. No more. Each civilian group would fly out to Washington D.C., with people taking different flights at staggered times. I needed, minimum, one million people.


Slowly, and though much criticism of everyone there, I pounded the concept home and his face went from scowl to something akin of a parade rest. Then he spoke.

?All right, damn it, we’re going to do this. Get you’re sorry hides on the line. I wanted this done yesterday.?

Turns out we had our numbers, and quite a few offers to uncover gun catches and circulate them. I held firm and we declined.

So we flew to Washington in twos and threes and the Deltas followed in buses (the air transit system was too closely monitored for fugitives and suspected revolutionaries). We gathered as small groups in alleys and along streets in D.C., using a hand gesture easily missed to those not looking for it. From there we clumped and grew into the larger and larger groups, some times stringing for blocks or even a mile. We converged at 1600 along parallel streets and then pushed inward. This took about forty five minutes. Above Deltas handled the Primers and air power being assembled against the mass of humanity.

I won’t say that there weren’t casualties and much blood ran that day, but the sheer number of us caught the security goons off guard and the real Secret Service simply prevented him from being hurt, escorting him into the street for us and marching him to the Capitol building where a joint session of Congress was held to formally impeach him that night. He was held under citizen’s arrest until the morning, when he was put before one of the few federal judges left on the bench of the Supreme Court (a man in his nineties) and we held a jury trial, gathering random people from the street as jurors, though some were ready to lynch him. It was November of ’99, so we had elections to commence.

I endorsed Patriot as President, being now well known after the Revolution. He won by a slim margin, showing that the country still suffered vestigial Delta hatred. I took I took Chief of Staff of the Army, purged the officer Corps and patched up the command structure as best as I could before as I could before commencing new NATO exercises and sending a massive surplus of weaponry to the UK and Scandanavia (the only two regions to honor their NATO obligations). That ticked off the Soviets enough to finally bring war, which we won, but not with out our losses. The Franco-German lead European Federation wanted in on the occupation and half my time was split between administering relations between post Soviet states turned neo-Octoberist democracies and keeping the Eurocorps troops on their side of the border.

I restored Annalise to her thrown, taking her cousin by the collar throwing him in the closest prison. She never did marry and I didn’t know exactly. I knew it couldn’t be just because of me, but i also couldn’t help feeling that I had a role to play. Early on I gave her a vial of my blood.

?In this lies the secret of what I am. If you use it you will never die, but you will also never have a place to call home. You will meet others who share the same with you. We may even meet again.?

After going through ten Presidencies as Chief of Staff of the Army and watching the colonies on Mars and the Moon reach five digits each, I retired. I got blindsided by a meteor while doing some high atmosphere flying and that was all she wrote…

In the Multiverser game I’m running, one of my players is getting bored. He’s worked his way successfully through the main plot arc, and is getting a little tired of the world he’s in. The obvious solution to that is to kill him off, especially since I’m fairly confident that he’s going to enjoy his next world. Unfortunately, no matter what I throw at him, he seems to rise to the challenge and escape unscathed. The dice aren’t doing me any favors either, no matter how much I pray for a botch.

So, I have a couple different options. I can keep trying to find new things for him to do in this world, or I can rig a couple rolls and send him on to his next adventure. This situation got me thinking about when it’s okay for a GM to cheat and what, for that matter, is really “cheating.”

Once, when I was a kid, I discovered that, no matter how many games I played, I couldn’t win at solitaire. Since I was getting bored with losing constantly, I changed the rules, letting myself reshuffle the deck once (and only once) if I needed to. When my baby-sitter saw what I was doing, she threatened to take the cards away from me if I couldn’t play without cheating. In my mind, that was horribly unfair, since I wasn’t hurting anybody. All I did was make up rules for a new game, one I had a chance of winning occasionally. Had I decided to make up new rules in the middle of a game of Monopoly, then she’d be justified in calling me a cheater. I gave this little anecdote to bring up the point that one person’s definition of cheating may differ from another’s. In my opinion, cheating is breaking agreed-upon rules, usually to hurt somebody else or help yourself win the game.

So, when a GM considers whether or not to fudge a die roll or two ignore something listed in the rulebook, the first thing to consider is why you’re doing it. If you’re trying to “beat” the players, then I’d say it is cheating and should be avoided. If, on the other hand, you’re trying to make things more enjoyable for the players, then I’m not sure I’d call it cheating.

The second thing that’s important is the idea of “agreed-upon rules.” In a game that pits the players against the GM, the rules are needed for fairness. If the GM can arbitrarily decide that no, you don’t hit his dragon, even when you did, there’s no way to succeed. Because of that, players expect that a GM won’t tamper with those rolls. However, that’s not the only kind of game there is. If your group is more concerned with telling a good story, the rules might not be so important.

Either way, the important thing is, what do the players expect, what would make the game more enjoyable for them, and are you violating their trust if you break those rules? For those people who love to argue with the GM and say, “But the book says…” I’d like to point out that lots of rulebooks give the GM some liberty to ignore any rules that they don’t like or that get in the way of having a good time. In Hunter: The Reckoning, the Storyteller is told flat-out that they can discard any rules that hurt the game rather than helping it.

Coming back to the problem I’m having in my game, everything I’ve written so far would lead you to believe that yes, I am going to fudge some rolls if necessary to move this player on. However, that’s not the case. He and I have had conversations about gaming where he’s made it pretty clear that he thinks it’s unfair for the GM to fix rolls, no matter what the reasons, and that he wouldn’t want me stacking the odds, even if it were in his favor. So, to be fair to this player, I’m trying to do the next best thing. Instead of guaranteeing his death by fixing the rolls, I’ll keep throwing challenges at him that get progressively more difficult. Okay, fine, you beat the pirates and the sea monster. Here, play with this dragon for a while. Oh, you beat the dragon, too? Okay, that was the *baby* dragon, and mommy and daddy really aren’t happy.

The thing I need to remember is that I’m not doing this to be malicious or to beat him but to give him the opportunity to move on to a situation where he’ll enjoy himself. If I’m doing it to “win,” then it becomes just another way to cheat. The real question, I guess, isn’t whether you fudge the rolls or let the dice fall where they may. It’s whether or not you try to make the game fun for your players and treat them the way you’d want to be treated if you were on that side of the table.

  Some nights I sit down to play and the first roll of the dice is bad.  Then I’ll roll another bad roll, and another–and at that point I figure I’m doomed, it’s going to be a bad night.

  I wish I had the opposite experience more often.  I know players who do, who get on a roll as they say and just keep coming up with good numbers.  That’s an experience I don’t usually share.

  This is almost certainly another example of that confirmation of superstition we discussed a while back in Numerology:  our own tendency to notice that which confirms our beliefs and expectations and to ignore that which does not.  I have had nights on which after a bad start the dice warmed up and everything went extremely well; I’ve had other nights on which an auspicious beginning turned into a nightmarish end.

  Auspicious–that’s what we call it when something good or bad happens which we, usually retrospectively, identify as portending what is to come.  The auspics, the portents, the omens, all words for the same idea, tell us that things are going to be good, or bad, based on something little at the beginning.  Games aren’t really like that.  The odds of rolling 45 or better on a hundred sided die are going to be the same every time you roll it, and although there will be quirks here and there, over the long haul those runs of luck will even out into fifty six successes for every hundred rolls.  Gamer superstition aside, three bad rolls in a row do not warn of a bad night, and three good rolls do not set a pattern.

  What, though, if they did?

  This was the idea that came to me.  People do believe in luck, and they believe in omens, portents, auspics, all the subtle signs that tell which way that luck is going to go.  Could you design a game in which that actually was true?

  This is how I would do it.  Every time you rolled the dice for a check, success would give you a bonus–one point on a percentile system, a fraction of a point on anything less.  Every time you rolled a failure, a penalty would be assessed in the same amount.  Note how this works.  Let’s suppose you have a 50% chance of success.  After three successes in a row, you would have a 53% chance of success at the same roll.  Your early successes tip the balance; the more successes you have, the more likely you are to succeed.

  I’m not, I should specify, talking about short-term skill improvement.  I mean that if you successfully cross the narrow bridge, you’re more likely to hit the dragon.  This bonus applies to everything you do, and is earned from everything you do.  The same is true for the penalty.  If you missed the shot on the troll, your odds of leaping across the chasm to escape are that much less.  Bad luck, in this instance, really does snowball; good luck similarly builds on itself.

  You would need a reset button at some point.  My personal preference would be that everything gets cleared to zero when the character spends the night asleep in his own bed (or similar safe zone).  That should prevent someone from building an infallible bonus and keeping it forever, while allowing bad luck streaks to continue for an entire adventure segment if desired.

  What intrigues me is the choices players would make were they aware of this adjustment.

  At first, everyone would play it safe–do things for which you have to roll, but your chance of success is strong, so that you’re likely to build up some good luck.  People who get streaks of bad luck right at the start will make comments like, “I should have stayed in bed; today just isn’t my day”–and they will be right.  As the bonus builds, people would take more chances; one or two failures against a lot of successes isn’t going to shake the world any.

  What I really expect, though, is that the player who has been on a long lucky streak and built up a substantial bonus may take incredible risks, attempting things at which no one could imagine succeeding, because his bonus is high enough that he’s turned no chance at all to worth the risk.  This could create particularly colorful games, as the heroes say they feel lucky and make the impossible jump or the incredible shot or the amazing escape.  Luck really is on their side–they have built up a luck bonus from all those successful rolls that they’ve had already, and relied on it to do the remarkable.

  How would you justify it?  The easy way would simply be to say that the auspics are true, that luck really does exist, and it’s determined by the rolls.  A less magical way would be to suggest that success builds confidence in the character, such that he believes he can do things and dares to try with high expectations.  Either way, success creates success, and failure creates failure, and it may feel more realistic than you might expect.

  It would be interesting, instead, to turn the entire system on its head–to reward failure with bonuses and punish successes with penalties.  This would have the effect of making people’s luck run out, and conversely of leading to dramatic upturns.  I’m less certain how workable it is, though, particularly as it would have the tendency to be self-cancelling:  the more you succeed, the less chance you have to continue succeeding, but the more you fail, the more likely you are to succeed next time.  That might be a positive feature, as it would tend to cause significant reversals of fortune during play.  On the other hand, it would also cause all chances of success at everything to shift to fifty/fifty ultimately, regardless of where they began.  After a couple hours of play, the best and worst characters would both be in the middle on most rolls.  So this idea would require a bit more tweaking to make it work right.

  In my column Faith and Gaming:  Justice I suggested that a referee could create a world in which justice was encouraged by giving incremental bonuses for constructive deeds and incremental penalties for harmful ones.  In game design you can give bonuses for whatever you want to encourage.  There is something inherently logical about encouraging the belief in portents in a fantasy game, or even in a slightly fantastic magical modern one, and a system like this might just do the trick smoothly.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.